I'm a New York- based writer at Forbes, where I write about entrepreneurs and other topics. I've profiled companies and entrepreneurs in China, Pakistan, Argentina, Mexico, India and South Africa. I started my journalism career at ABC News, first in Peter Jennings' documentary unit and then with Barbara Walters at 20/20. In 2010 I received a fellowship from the International Reporting Project, and spent five weeks in Bolivia reporting on politics, public health and other topics. I graduated from Princeton University. You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/hcoster

Forbes' List of the Top 30 Social Entrepreneurs

Darell Hammond read a Washington Post article about children who suffocated while playing in an abandoned car because they had nowhere else to play. Willy Foote met vanilla farmers in Mexico who didn’t have access to credit and couldn’t connect to markets. Sara Horowitz was working at a lawyer, didn’t qualify for health insurance because she was considered a “freelancer,” and started thinking about other people who faced the same problem. While working in Argentina, Linda Rottenberg wondered why more Latin American entrepreneurs didn’t create global companies.

And then– unlike millions of us who recognize some kind of problem, feel a pang of hopelessness, and move on– Hammond, Foote and others shifted careers and set about fixing the problems they saw in the world.

Take Jordan Kassalow, for example. An optometrist by training, Kassalow now runs an organization that sells ready-made reading glasses to people in the developing world. (Check out a longer profile here.)

Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun, of D.Light Design, manufacture inexpensive lamps and sell them in communities that don’t have reliable electricity.

Tom Skazy dropped out of Princeton to create Terracycle, which sells fertilizer and over 250 products made from 60 waste streams.

Jane Chen’s company manufactures a sleeping bag-like device called the “Thermpod,” which warms low-birth weight babies in hospitals and clinics that have unreliable electricity and heat lamps that don’t always work.

Some of the people on our list run nonprofits, so the market-based approach doesn’t apply. But we’ve included them anyway, because they’re creating innovative, new solutions to a host of old problems.

To select our list, we recruited a blue-ribbon panel of experts, including:

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World’s top 30 or America’s top 30?! – I am a huge fan of every name on this list and find their work really inspiring. At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice two things – Most of them are US based and/or are American led and two, there is no mention of incredible leaders from other parts of the world like Prof Yunus. I do hope that there is a typo behind this and not a crazy assumption by Forbes that US is the world. :)

Agree with these comments. Let’s please remember the USA is less than 5% of the world’s population! There are some terrific social enterprises not on your list but doing amazing work worldwide including ALISON, (Ireland) and the Center for Digital Inclusion (Brazil) – both educating for free many millions of learners, mostly marginalized. Look also to Southern Africa, India, SE Asia where social entrepreneurs are operating not just in education, but healthcare, health literacy. Bottom line, your list, terrific as it is, needs to look far beyond New York..

Really great to see Forbes recognise the social entrepreneurship sector. The days of straight aid are numbered, with more mindful, sustainable investments being central to empowering developing communities.

While I agree with the comments about the piece not being entirely representative, could this be because the field of social entrepreneurship is so wide?

Social entrepreneurship projects span from problem-specific initiatives to commercial/development orientated business models that have been scale across entire continents. Perhaps there are more categories required, and more pieces such as this one that not only encourage dialogue around social entrepreneurship, but seek to define the impact that is being made.

This is a great start to a global ranking of the top social entrepreneurship businesses, but I hope it is just the beginning of a more detailed, inclusive discussion.

-Amy Heydenrych (@amyheydenrych) on behalf of GroFin (@grofin): Supporting entrepreneurs with a pioneering combination of flexible finance and local expertise. Actively investing in 9 countries in Africa and the Middle East through the largest fund of its kind dedicated to small and medium businesses.

This is a terrific list of leading Social Enterprises based in the US. In order to call it the list of the world’s top social entrepreneurs, it should particularly include leading social enterprises based in India, Bangladesh, Brazil, South Africa and other countries with a very vibrant social enterprise sector that outshine the rest in terms of innovation and size! For some inspiration of these global leading enterprises, see the list of Top 200 from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship (http://www.schwabfound.org) or the Skoll Foundation Fellows (http.//www.skollfoundation.org).

Why trade stocks when there is hardly any money there? Could somebody please tell me that? Trading Oil is far better and more profitable, you can make $200 to $5,000 per day trading oil, and that’s no joke! All you need to know is the SECRET for trading Oil. Are you ready to learn the SECRET? If you’re even the slightest bit interested go to the following web page: Google oil trading academy.

I think brij may have a point. But then again, the idea of Social Entrepreneurs is unique to the US and possibly to the UK. Only now its spreading to other parts of the world. Possibly in few years time there will be other nationalities from various continents in the list.

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